Modeling and Verification of Change Processes in Collaborative Software Engineering

In collaborative software engineering, many change processes implementing change requests are executed concurrently by different workers. However, the fact that the workers do not have sufficient information about the others' work and complicated dependencies among artifacts can lead to unexpected inconsistencies among the change-impacted artifacts. By focusing on the contexts of the changes, i.e. the change processes containing the changes, rather than the concurrent changes only like the previous works, we have proposed an approach that helps the workers detect and resolve the inconsistencies more effectively [1]. Our approach is to build a Change Support Environment (CSE) that represents the change processes explicitly as the Change Support Worflows (CSWs) and manages their execution based on our patterns of inconsistency, including many patterns besides the conflict patterns mentioned in the previous works. To evaluate the feasibility of our proposed approach, this paper presents a formal model of CSE using Colored Petri Nets (CPN) to model the artifacts, and both data flow and control flow of CSWs. CPN Tools is used to edit, simulate, and verify the CPN model of CSE to detect data-related abnormalities, in particular the patterns of inconsistency. Differently from the previous works in workflow modeling, our method for modeling CSWs using CPN can represent many aspects of a workflow, including data flow, control structure, and execution time, in one single model. Data and changes on the value of data are also represented explicitly. In addition, our modeling and verification method can be applied to other types of workflow.